1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to network communications, and more particularly to authentication of network communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems often communicate over networks using frame-based communications. It is important to provide security for such network communications to protect user data and to ensure network reliability. A major component of a complete network security framework is authentication. Authentication can be defined as the validation of a unique user identity and profile. Current authentication methods are implemented in layers 2 or above of the OSI model and are defined in the context of various networking protocols. Unfortunately, security attacks may also target the physical layer, layer 1. Although a physical layer attack may not gain access to an internal network, host compute and network bandwidth can nevertheless be stolen from legitimate users as nodes must process all received packets before any attempt at higher layer authorization may be initiated.
It has been proposed to vary the length of the inter-packet gap (IPG) contained within frames of network communications in order to achieve quality of service (QoS) capability through congestion control, i.e., by increasing the IPG of a given frame stream in order to decrease the effective packet transmittal rate of the frame stream.